Two Months In

On settling, and a city that keeps making friends for us.

Hello, lovely.

Two months in.

I’m quietly waiting for the moment where it clicks, where D.C. stops feeling like a place I am getting to know and starts feeling like the place I live. And then I remember that I have done this before. Fort Collins to Denver took a solid year before I felt established, primarily through work and the friendships that came with it. Denver to Scottsdale, then a layoff six weeks in and debilitating chronic migraines six months after that, it was well over a year before Arizona felt like home. Phoenix to Prescott was different, more of a cocoon than a settling, Rob and I incubating together, getting quiet, getting clear, getting engaged, getting married. We ended up not really trying to put down roots there. We were unknowingly preparing for something.

And now here. Two months into our first eighteen-month lease and I know, from experience, that it always takes longer than you think it will. I also know that we arrived here with different energy and different purpose than any move before. So I give us credit. We are in process, and I’m loving it.

The finish line, when I actually let myself name it, is not dramatic. It is our home in order, the last of the nesting done, Rob’s office comfortable and functional, a daily rhythm I can feel good about in these final eight to ten weeks of pregnancy. Movement, rest, learning, the projects I want to have in a good place before I put everything down and walk fully into motherhood. And connection, the slow, real kind, with the few women I have started to meet here, while keeping the thread alive with my people across the country. That is what settled looks like to me right now. We are closer than I sometimes can see.

I have met three pregnant women in two months. One at mass, whose life feels like a parallel version of ours, married in December, due in September, the kind of conversation where you walk away thinking I think we are going to be friends. One on our front patio on a sunny afternoon, Axel being the social catalyst he always is, she was walking by and stopped to say hello to him and somehow a few exchanged sentences turned into a connection I am hoping to sit down over coffee with soon. And one at the Eastern Market on Mother’s Day.

That morning, I had every intention of wearing a yellow sundress I had been saving since the move, the one I had promised myself I would wear in the DC spring and look adorable in with my pregnant belly. It did not zip halfway up. Neither did the next three outfits. Eventually, I surrendered to my single pair of maternity jeans and a blue tank top, which, for the record, still looked cute. We walked through the market and I noticed her, maternity jeans, hand in hand with her husband, a bouquet of pink flowers. We smiled at each other the way pregnant women sometimes do, a glance of recognition, and kept walking. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. She had turned around to ask about my jeans.

The four of us stood there in the middle of the market, plus Axel, and talked. We made plans for the following Saturday. When I journaled my gratitudes at the end of that night, I wrote that I was grateful nothing else fit and that I was wearing exactly what I needed to be wearing to meet them. We spent a couple of hours with them over the weekend. They taught us a new card game and I am ordering us a deck this week.

This city is making friends for us in the most ordinary moments. I am paying attention.

Last week we attended our first conference here, a two-day gathering of close to four hundred people, values aligned, passionate, from all over the country. The kind of room where the conversations in the hallways are as substantive as the ones on the stage. We were invited by a friend of Rob’s whose work sits at the intersection of law, oversight, and civic life, the kind of person whose invitation you say yes to without needing the full details first. Both days ran ten to ten, sessions and meals and conversations stacked end to end. I learned things I would have only grazed the surface of on my own.

On the first day during introductions, Rob introduced us and said, “this is Alexus, my beautiful pregnant wife.” He says it that way often, on his show, but in rooms like this one, it was extra special. Every time I hear it, I just love and revel in how excited he is. I love how beautiful he sees me as I grow our baby. It also opened the door to conversations throughout both days, well wishes for our approaching birth, warmth from strangers who became a little less strange by the end of it. I walked away with a lunch date scheduled with a woman after her mother connected us via text at the event. Two strangers deciding the other one was worth knowing.

On the second afternoon Rob and I slipped out during a breakout session and found a quiet corner. We had been talking about vision planning and what we are building toward, and somehow in that stolen hour it came alive in a way our previous conversations had not quite reached. We talked about what we want our life to feel like, not just in three years but in the season before the next big vision, the one we are actively building now. I shared that I think of it as preparing ourselves so completely, so intentionally, that when the time comes to step into the grander version we can do it wholeheartedly, mind, body, and heart, nothing left unfinished, nothing dragged along. Rob and I both hold freedom as our highest value. The how and where and when of it we are happy to surrender. We know what we are moving toward even when we cannot see the exact shape of it yet.

This is new for me, or newer. Since 2022, I have practiced what I call directional surrender, knowing generally what I want and staying open to how it arrives. It has never felt more natural than it does right now, which is its own kind of personal progress.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, our birth team is complete. Midwifery clinic, doula, hypnobirthing coach, and a plan for a home birth that feels more right every week. We are two sessions into hypnobirthing and I am learning things that feel totally aligned with my studies and understandings before pregnancy. I have started turning my attention toward postpartum too, which is its own kind of preparation I did not expect to find so fascinating. There is something remarkable about growing a human being entirely without effort while simultaneously having so much to learn about how to receive and care for the one who is coming.

Over the weekend we took our thirty-week bump photo. We attended an infant CPR class. Rob moved the furniture out of the nursery and set up the guest room in the basement, all of it after a full conference week and a social Saturday. He inspires me every single day. He also reminds me, without always saying it directly, that my job right now is to soften. To relax. To calm. I do not always have to go as hard as he does. That is its own kind of gift.

Today I am driving to the airport to pick up my mom. By the time you read this, she will already be here.

I have been holding this pregnancy close. Sharing selectively, even with family, partly out of a desire to just experience it, to let it be mine and Rob’s before it belongs to the world. I grew up geographically close with my parents and my grandparents. This distance is a different kind of life, one I chose and one I love, and it also means that seeing my mom has happened in glimpses. January at our reception in Arizona. A quick stop in March, less than twelve hours, before we hit the road for DC. And now, seven months in, she is coming here.

She told me a few weeks ago that she had watched a grandmother put her grandbaby into a car seat, one of those ordinary handoff moments, and thought, I am not really going to get to do that. She did not say it with sadness exactly. Just with the quiet recognition that our life looks different than that. And when she said it, I felt the full weight of what this visit means.

It does not matter what we do while she is here. It never does with her. We could sit on the couch and watch television. We could find somewhere to watch the sunrise. We could do nothing at all. The point is she will get to see me thirty weeks and some days pregnant, in our new home, in this new city, in this new season of my life.

I cannot wait to open the door.